Was There A Witness Beside God During Creation Of The World?
02 June 2013
By Saeed Qureshi
The book of Genesis in Old Testament or Hebrew
scripture Bible has narrated the six days creation
saga of the world (not universe). The unknown writer
narrates step by step the actions of God in creating
heavens and earth, followed by light, day and night,
then water, then grass and herbs, then living
creatures in the water and dry land and air, and
finally man in his own image.
The writer is definitively watching this unfolding
process of creation by remaining with God for six
days. After creating man God rests on the seventh day.
The creation of man is described in Bible in the
following words," And the lord God formed man of the
dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the
breath of life; and man became a living being".
Amazingly God does not create a female separately but
converts one of the ribs of Adam into woman. The story
of serpent misguiding Eve is ridiculous and
interesting as well.
A serpent is living in Garden of Eden (supposed to be
Yemen) and he is able to mislead and prevail upon Eve
to eat the forbidden fruit. Till that time an all
knowing God was unaware as to what was going on in the
paradise. He asks Adam how he knew that he was naked
and Adam tells God the whole story. God is annoyed
over the fact that Adam had become knowledgeable. As a
punishment both Adam and Eve are plunged into a life
of toil and hard work to survive. They produce two
sons: Cain and Abel. Cain kills Abel. The apprehension
of angels that man would be troublesome proves to be
true.
Islam's story is different. As a punishment for
disobeying God's commandment not to eat the forbidden
fruit, God sends them to earth to become a perpetual
target of Satan whose job is to derail him from the
divine path. The conversation between God, the arch
angel Satan and angels is given in the holy Quran. God
punishes Adam for a minor mistake but gives limitless
powers and freedom to Satan to prey upon the humans.
Can God be that much unjust or making such visibly
faulty decisions?
Don't these two versions look contradictory and at the
same time a fairy tale? Contradictory in the sense
that instead empowering Adam, he bestows his bounties
on Satan to be his competitor in disobedience. After
reading these stories the profile of God that comes
before us is a simple and ignorant creator who
willingly creates a rival and unleashes him upon his
choice creation.
Now in Islam there is an undeniable logical rationale
for creation of the cosmos, one may interpret as world
or the universe. The God almighty uttered the world
Kun (Be) and it became or came into being (Fayakun).
That command or God's creative powers do not beg any
supplementary question or query because God as the
supreme creator of the universe is capable of creating
anything on the spur of fraction of a second and even
in lesser time. The theory of Big Bang comes closer to
this postulation.
What look suspicious or rather frivolous is that an
all powerful God remained busy for six days to create
the world. Incidentally when God started the process
of creation there were no days or nights. The days and
nights were created on the third day and therefore the
first three days were practically nonexistent. The
creation process is spawned over a week or so and at
the end God takes a rest as if he is tired and wanted
a respite. The writer forgot that when the days and
nights were created on the fourth day, how we could he
count for the non-existent three days in the
beginning.
That seventh day in Judaism is Sabbath (from sundown
Friday to sundown Saturday) and to follow the
tradition of God's taking rest on the seventh day, the
Jews too lay off on Saturday and do nothing. So much
so that when Jesus Christ was to be buried in a tomb,
it was done hastily on Friday as Sabbath time was
about to start.
The Genesis story suggests that besides God there was
someone who was all the time present there and
watching and recording the process of creation taking
place. Unless there is s foolproof evidence that
someone was there, how can we accept such a version of
creation of the world unless God himself revealed it
to someone?
The Bible both old (Hebrew scripture) and New
Testament (Christian Greek Scripture) were written
over a period of 1600 years( 1513 B.C.E. to 98 C.E.)
by some 40 writers in various ages. The Old Testament
consists of 39 books and the new 27 books. It is
therefore, an anthology of 66 books altogether.
Perhaps the first writer was Prophet Moses (born 1593
B.C.E.) who passed on the oral laws and written
commandments given to him by God on the Mount Sinai
while the Jewish nation was stuck in Sinai desert for
40 years. After the destruction of the Jerusalem
temple by Romans in 70 C.E., the Jews dispersed and
most of them settled in Greece and around
Mediterranean. The Jewish literature and religious
books were also destroyed with the destruction of the
temple built by Prophet Solomon the son of Prophet
David.
During the next four centuries, under influence of
Greek thought and mythology, the Old Testament was
recast and rewritten from memory or traditions, by
Jewish Rabbis and scholars with countless additions
and deletions of the original texts. The tradition of
temple and priesthood were overshadowed by the oral
elucidation, commentaries and explanations of the Old
Testament. The commentaries and complex explanations
by rabbis were compiled into a book that is called
Talmud. It is akin to Muslims' kind of Tafseer or
Hadith.
The Diaspora Jews were enormously influenced by Greek
philosophy and culture and is reflected in Talmud. One
such influence was the belief in immortal soul. It
means that when an individual dies his soul should
still live in another place. But the collective
resurrection of the dead is also part of the Bible. So
there seems to be a contradiction between the
collection resurrection on the final day and the
concept of immortality of individual soul. In Bible
there is a mention of collective resurrection. The
addition of immortal soul was added in Judaism under
the influence of Greek mythology.
Islam has resolved this tangle by espousing that the
dead man's soul rests in purgatory (barzakh) and would
come back to each person and they would come to life
again. There is a strong possibility that during their
interaction with Greek culture, religious dogmas and
philosophy, the Genesis and other chapters were
rewritten by Jewish scholars. The first five books in
the Old Testament including Genesis are called Torah.
On the face, the creation of the world in six days and
making of Adam with bare hands looks to be the
invention of a fictional and fanciful mind without
realizing that it derides and belittles a God, who in
all faiths is and ought to be omnipotent, omniscient
and omnipresent. How could he soil his hands in the
dust? How is God supposed to be using hands and
breathing like a human? How the lord of the world gets
tired and rests on the 7th day? These are some
critical questions that come to a curious mind?
The Genesis can best be described as a fable written
for the children or the credulous, colored with
suspense and fantasy. It is utterly hard for the
people of this age to accept it as a rational and
absolute truth. It is funny, frivolous and untenable.
It underlines the limited human traits of a creator
who otherwise is managing this amazing universe with
absolutely flawless scientific principles. The
evolution is central to this universe and that can be
the true explanation for an ever changing world. How
the existence or creation started, through a big bang
or some other way: we do not know. But certainly the
story of Genesis in Torah is not an answer to that
gigantic question.
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